Roy Dade writes: John, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed your Skywings articles. Just a suggestion but packing is an often debated topic on the hill. I’ve often felt a tight neat pack is good if walking in or out any distance to stop the rubbing of glider fabric against fabric but [...]

Most of us are aware that water, heat and salt are bad news for our wings. Each of them individually is bad, but in combination they can cause significantly accelerated deterioration. But what’s going on exactly? And how does understanding the process help us deal with unintended exposure? Let’s [...]

Over the last couple of months we’ve had a number of gliders fail because there lines were no longer strong enough to fly safely. In each case the pilot was disappointed – that’s entirely understandable – but in a couple of cases surprised as well. So what might be [...]

With the flying season drawing to a close, you may find yourself thinking about next year’s adventures, after winter has passed and welcome warmth returns. But it’s also that time of year to spare a thought for your reserve: is it up to the job that it might just be [...]

You may have seen from my SIV article a couple of months ago that I was in Annecy earlier this year. While I was there I took the opportunity to visit Rip’Air, a counterpart of Aerofix in that part of the world. I’m always interested to swap notes with other [...]

Find out about fitting a replacement line and how to ensure it matches your existing lineset by fitting different loops at the maillon if necessary. Fitting a replacement line is something that can be done by most pilots given enough time, space and patience. But since linesets are prone [...]

As we enjoy the heat of summer, hopefully with our glider in trim and our reserve repacked, is there anything else we should do to make sure we’re having our fun as safely as possible? Well, one of the common answers is to make sure we’re up to date [...]

You may have read an article that appeared in Skywings last August about porosity. In that article I referred to the diagram in Ozone’s paper about SharkNose technology which showed how the difference between the internal wing pressure and the external pressure is greatest at the leading edge (Figure 1). [...]

Since we started using laser equipment to measure glider linesets at Aerofix, we’ve measured over a thousand gliders. Measuring the distance from the risers to every attachment point on a canopy reveals exactly where line lengths deviate from specification, and the program we wrote enables us to determine exactly what [...]